This masterclass brings together prominent empirically oriented linguists working on variation in time and space.

Taking discourse interaction to be the crucial setting of cross-linguistic variation and language change, where speakers and hearers negotiate meaning and create new meaning, we need linguistic theories that account for the way meaning as encoded in language structure arises from language use in communication. We invite participants interested in discussing the ways in which historical and synchronic corpus data reflect actual language use in concrete communication settings, and inspire hypotheses about linguistic competence.

With Giuseppe Longobardi, Heike Wiese and Artemis Alexiadou

Registration

The morning lectures are open to everyone interested, including participants from the colloquium, local colleagues, et cetera.

PhD students and advanced (second year) Research Master students in linguistics can register for both the morning and the afternoon session.

Upon registration, students have to specify participation in parallel sessions 1, 2 or 3. They also have to upload either (a preliminary version of) their poster or a short abstract of their poster (max. 1 page). These will be sent to the teachers of the masterclass to help them prepare for the research discussions.